If Wishes Were Earls (3 page)

Harriet sighed with relief, feeling as if part of her burden was lifted. She had missed her dear friends ever so much. With Tabitha and Daphne married and living in London and at their husbands’ various estates, Harriet had found herself alone in Kempton, the distant village where the three of them had grown up.

Of course, not even Kempton was the same. It had been decades since a Kempton spinster had even dared to marry, let alone the centuries that had passed since one had made a marriage that hadn’t ended with the bridegroom meeting a horrific and untimely ending.

Usually on his wedding night.

And for several months after Tabitha and Daphne had married, it seemed every miss in the village had held her breath waiting for some disaster to befall Lord Henry or the Duke of Preston, or, heaven forbid, their brides.

But when neither Tabitha nor Daphne had gone mad and dashed their husbands over the head with a fire poker, there had been an emergency meeting of the Society for the Temperance and Improvement of Kempton.

Rising to her feet, the most esteemed of all the spinsters, Lady Essex, declared the curse broken.

“However can that be?” Miss Theodosia Walding asked, pushing her spectacles back up onto her nose. A bluestocking through and through, Theodosia liked her facts.

“Love,” Lady Essex announced.

“True love,” Lavinia Tempest corrected, her twin sister, Louisa, nodding in agreement.

The rest of the spinsters, who of course had heard Lavinia—one always heard Lavinia before one saw her—sighed with delight, while Theodosia frowned. She found such a fickle emotion as love or as ethereal as “true love” rather impossible to believe.

Yet, wasn’t the proof before them? Tabitha and Daphne happily married. The curse must be ended and now it was time for all the spinsters, daughters and misses of Kempton to do what had been unthinkable before: prepare a glory box and make a match.

The rush at Mrs. Welling’s dress shop had been akin to a stampede.

Not that Harriet had gotten caught up in the furor.

No, Harriet Hathaway’s heart had been lost months earlier and all the evidence suggested he’d forsaken her.

No, he couldn’t have. Not Roxley, she told herself.

It was an endless refrain she couldn’t get out of her head.

He loves me. He loves me not.

She rose up on her tiptoes to look over Preston’s tall shoulders to see if his party included one more.

Roxley.

But to her chagrin, there was no sign of the earl. No hint of his devil-may-care smile, his perfectly cut Weston jacket, or that sly look of his that said he was working on the perfect quip to leave her laughing.

Bother! Where the devil was he? Harriet’s slipper tapped anew.

“Harriet!” Tabitha called out, rushing toward her and wrapping her into a big hug. They had been best friends since childhood, and had never been separated for so long. “How I have missed you.”

“And I you,” Harriet confessed. Unfolding herself from Tabitha’s warm embrace, she smiled at Daphne. “And you as well.”

“Truly, Harriet?” Daphne said, waving her off. “I doubt very much you’ve missed me chiding you about the mud on your hem.”

Harriet pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. Truly, she hadn’t missed Daphne’s exacting fashion standards. Still, she hugged her anyway, and to her surprise, Daphne hugged her back.

“I’ve missed you,” her friend confessed. “You and your horrible Miss Darby novels.”

Harriet dashed at the hot sting of tears that seemed to come out of nowhere. It wasn’t until this moment that she realized just how lonely Kempton had become without Tabitha at the vicarage and Daphne down the lane at Dale House.

How much she wanted to tell them . . . and yet couldn’t.

“The Miss Darby novels are not horrible,” she shot back, more out of habit than not. “I just got the latest one.
Miss Darby’s Reckless Bargain
. You
must
read it. Both of you. She’s been captured by a Barbary sultan, a prince actually, and he’s about to—” Harriet came to a stop as she found her friends pressing their lips together to keep from laughing over her earnest enthusiasm for her beloved Miss Darby.

Preston and Lord Henry, after exchanging a pair of befuddled glances, begged off and went to find where Lord Knolles kept something stronger than lemonade.

“Oh, don’t look now, Tabitha, but Lady Timmons is here,” Daphne said, nudging the duchess in the ribs.

“My aunt won’t come over here as long as you are beside me, Daphne,” Tabitha replied, and rather gleefully so.

“Whyever not?” Harriet asked, glancing over at Lady Timmons, who stood across the ballroom encircled by her three unmarried daughters. With a duchess for a niece, it made no sense that the lady wouldn’t be cultivating Tabitha for introductions.

“She considers Daphne a bad example,” the duchess confided. “She wrote me that it was imperative I sever my friendship with Lady Henry or else she couldn’t, in good conscience, acknowledge me.”

“Then I suggest you stay close at hand for Tabitha’s sake,” Harriet told Lady Henry. They all laughed again, for Lady Timmons had done her best to prevent Tabitha from marrying Preston, then had conveniently forgotten her objections to the match once she could claim a connection to a duchess.

As Tabitha and Daphne begged Harriet for news of Kempton—the most recent antics of the Tempest twins, Theodosia’s newest scholarly pursuits, Lady Essex’s latest complaints—Harriet noticed something else.

She looked from Tabitha to Daphne. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she nearly burst out, looking at the swell of their stomachs, Tabitha’s far more advanced than Daphne’s.

“You know these things are not spoken of,” Tabitha whispered, once again the vicar’s daughter.

“Pish,” Daphne said. “Men talk of breeding dogs and horses all the time! We mention a single thing about being in the family way and you would think we were asking them to walk down Bond Street without their breeches on!” She huffed a grand sigh. “Henry has gone so far as to forbid me from dancing—he won’t have me exerting myself in any way.” Her hands folded over the bulge. “He’s become as fussy as Aunt Damaris, but I don’t dare tell him that.”

“Speaking of your Dale relations,” Harriet said, “your mother actually mentioned your name the other day.”

Daphne’s parents had refused to acknowledge their daughter after she’d gone and eloped with a Seldon. Harriet never understood the point of it all, but to the Dales, the Seldon clan was akin to the devil. And vice versa. That their daughter had married one . . . well . . .

“Our happy news has helped, but I believe I have Cousin Crispin’s recent match to thank for their changing opinion about my husband and his family.”

“Then it’s true,” Harriet said. “Lord Dale has married her?”

Daphne covered her mouth to keep from bursting out with laughter. “Oh, he did. Mr. Muggins saw to that.”

Tabitha, mortified over the part her dog had played in making Lord Dale’s proposal of marriage—having locked the viscount and his unlikely choice in a wine cellar—changed the subject. “Is it true the Tempest twins are coming to London for the rest of the Season?”

Harriet nodded. “Yes. They’ll be here in a fortnight. Their godmother, Lady Charleton, is sponsoring them.”

“Lady Charleton?” an old matron who was standing nearby blurted out. “Did you say Lady Charleton?”

“Aye, ma’am,” Harriet replied.

“Can’t be right. Lady Charleton died . . . What is it now?” She turned to the even more ancient crone beside her. “When was it that Lady Charleton died?”

“Two years now. So sudden it was,” the other woman said, shaking her head, leaving the yellow plumes in her turban all atwitter. “Dreadful situation still.”

“Lady Charleton is dead?” Harriet shook her head. “I must have the name wrong.”

“You must.” The old lady turned back to her cronies and began clucking about yet another misfortune.

“Speaking of sponsors, where is Lady Essex?” Tabitha asked, glancing around them as if to gauge who else was eavesdropping on their conversation.

“Have you missed her as well?” Harriet teased.

Daphne and Tabitha both laughed. The spinster was a bit of a holy terror, not that Harriet minded.

“Some old roué swept her off her feet the moment we arrived,” Harriet said. “Called her ‘Essie.’ ”

“No!” Tabitha gasped.

“Yes!” Harriet nodded. “A Lord Whenby, I think his name is.”

The three of them looked over at the eavesdropping old lady, but the name didn’t elicit a response.

Daphne leaned closer. “Who is he?”

Harriet shrugged. She’d never heard Lady Essex mention the man. “I don’t know. Perhaps that’s why she’s been at sixes and sevens for weeks now.”

At this, Tabitha and Daphne exchanged a wary glance, one that suggested they might have quite a different explanation.

Harriet kept going, for now her interest was piqued. “I didn’t think she was even going to come up to London this Season, but she arrived a few days ago at the Pottage and insisted my mother pack my bags.”

There was yet another silent exchange between Daphne and Tabitha, but before Harriet could dig deeper into whatever
on dit
they were hiding, they were joined by a less than welcome guest.

“Miss Hathaway? Is that you?”

Harriet cringed at the familiar masculine voice.

“Do my eyes, nay, my heart, deceive me?” An elegantly dressed man in a dashing coat and well-glossed boots stopped before them.

She pasted a quick smile on her lips. “Lord Fieldgate,” she acknowledged before dipping into a curtsy.

When she rose, he immediately caught hold of her hand and brought it to his lips. “My long-lost Hippolyta.”

Daphne leaned over to Tabitha. “Hippolyta?”

“Queen of the Amazons,” the duchess whispered back.

Daphne snorted.

“Roughly translated it means ‘an unbridled mare.’ ” Tabitha’s education by her vicar father always came in handy in situations like this.

Daphne pressed her lips together to keep from laughing.

“Yes, exactly,” Tabitha remarked. “If only the viscount knew how close to the mark his title for Harriet is.”

Harriet shot them both a sharp glance.
It isn’t as if I can’t hear you.

“I must beg a dance of you,” Fieldgate continued. Nor had he let go of Harriet’s hand. “No, make that two.” Oh, no one could say the viscount lacked charm, for his smile smoldered with promise, a sort of smoky glance that could make a lady go weak in the knees.

“Two?” Harriet shook her head at her ardent suitor who had pursued her so steadily the previous Season. Apparently absence had not dimmed Fieldgate’s ardor.

“The supper dance, at the very least,” he pleaded.

The supper dance? Harriet’s pique returned. Roxley would deplore that. He had hated it every time she’d danced with the viscount last Season.

Then again, it would serve the earl right to have to partner some leftover debutante to supper, especially after all these months of silence on his part.

Her heart gave a familiar leap into that horrible abyss over which she’d been teetering for months.

He loves me, he loves me not.

Well, tonight, she’d discover the truth. If she had to carve it out of the cursed man with one of the ancient broadswords mounted on the wall. Manacle him to a sideboard and . . . why, she’d  . . .

And then Harriet stopped. For indeed the entire world seemed to stop all around her. For across the room, off to one side, she saw him.

Roxley
.

He
was
here. Had been here for some time, for there he was holding court in the far corner.

He loves you, he loves you not
, her heart prodded.

“Can I take your silence to mean you’re granting me the supper dance . . .” Fieldgate’s words were both encouraging and full of confidence.

Harriet barely heard him, her heart hammering wildly. Roxley. With the crush of guests, she’d nearly missed him, but the crowd had parted for a moment and in that magical instant she’d spotted him. The cut of his jaw, the wry smile she loved.

Her breath stopped, as it had when his lips had teased across the nape of her neck. His hands had caressed her,
all of her
, and she’d trembled then as she was trembling now.

“A mistake, Kitten. This is ever so wrong,” he’d whispered that night at Owle Park even as his head had dipped lower, his lips leaving a trail of desire down her limbs.

Oh, please don’t let it all have been a mistake
, she told herself yet again. Harriet took a step toward the earl without even thinking, pulled by the very desire he’d ignited that night, forgetting even that the viscount still held her hand.

Roxley loves me
.

Or loves you not
, that dangerous voice of doubt whispered back.

“You cannot refuse me, my queen, my Hippolyta,” Fieldgate continued, all gallant manners, though he might as well have been grasping at straws.

“Yes, yes,” she said absently, glancing quickly back at him before plucking her hand free. Meaning,
Yes, I can refuse you.
But the viscount took her words for assent and grinned in triumph.

“Harriet, there is something we need to tell you—” Tabitha began, reaching out to stop her, but Harriet sidestepped her grasp.

“Yes, dear, you must listen,” Daphne continued like a chorus.

If they were going to warn her off from spending too much time in the roguish viscount’s company, they needn’t bother. She had no intention of spending another second with Fieldgate.

Not with Roxley so close at hand. She’d have her answers, he’d apologize profusely, sweep her off her feet and marry her as soon as a Special License could be procured.

That was how it always happened.

In fiction
, her sensibilities reminded her.

“Harriet, please,” Daphne called after her.

She ignored her. Truly, whatever they had to say could hardly matter, but just in case, Harriet hurried a bit, only to find her path blocked by her brother Chaunce.